The latest in Ivan Hewett’s 50-part series on short works by the world’s
greatest composers.

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Classical music can be carved up in all sorts of ways, but one way seems ideally clear-cut. There’s music, and there’s music for opera. One takes place in concert halls, and is listened to for its melodies and harmonies and ingenious formal patterns. The other is found in opera houses, and is there to give movement and passion to a drama.

But hardly any division in music is totally clear-cut. Operas have wonderful melodies, after all, which you can hum without knowing the words. And music can become drama. In some orchestral pieces, you can’t help hearing the oboe as a tragic heroine, or the to-and-fro between a violin and a flute as an amorous dialogue.

No musical form is more inherently theatrical than the concerto, where one instrument takes on the whole orchestra. And no concerto movement is more theatrical than the slow movement of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto. The first movement already has some surprises. Previously concertos had (almost) always begun with the orchestra. It prepared the ground by laying out the various melodies, which the soloist then played in its own way.

In Beethoven’s concerto it’s the soloist who sets things in motion, an effect which is still surprising but must have seemed electrifying in 1808, when the piece was premiered in Vienna (with Beethoven himself at the piano).

However, nothing in the quietly spoken, graceful first movement prepares us for the stark tragedy of the second. It presents us with an opposition as stark and absolute as the musical language of that time would allow. We hear an implacable, weighty phrase in the strings, answered by drooping, pathetic, defeated phrase in the piano. As the dialogue continues, the piano pleads its case more urgently, but each time it’s brutally put down by the strings. Eventually the piano wins out, and the strings are reduced almost to silence.

It’s deeply affecting music, which cries out for a narrative or pictorial interpretation. In the mid-19th century, a musical scholar named Marx came up with one from Greek mythology. He suggested that the piano represents Orpheus confronting the shades of Hell, who at first refuse to bend, but eventually yield to pity. It caught on, and was repeated so often that many people now think Beethoven himself had the Orpheus myth in mind. He didn’t, in fact, but he might have approved of the idea. This performance from Richard Goode and the Budapest Festival Orchestra doesn’t let the music drag, and is all the more moving for that.

LISTENING POINTS

00.00 The strings’ gruff phrase suggests a funeral march, or perhaps a row of prosecutors looking down at a supplicant below. The piano’s reply at 00.15 is fragile, but not crushed or shapeless. The idea of clear phrases in balanced pairs, which Beethoven inherited from Haydn and Mozart, still holds.

00.42 The strings’ second stern anathema swings the music into a major key, but somehow this makes the piano’s answering supplication seem even more pathetic. (This is the wonder of classical music. Things aren’t fixed. Minor doesn’t always mean sad, and major doesn’t always mean happy.)

1.16 Now back in the original minor key, the orchestra actually interrupts the piano. The Furies are becoming angrier, and they pursue the piano up through a rising sequence.

1.52 The piano’s pleas are working; the orchestra starts to soften through another rising sequence until finally...

2.18 The piano finds its voice with a beautifully resigned melody

2.47 This reaches a pitch of anguish with a long trill, then subsides back towards...

3.37 That stern gesture in the strings, now reduced to a bass whisper. Vanquished, they subside into a harmonic backdrop for the piano’s farewell.

FURTHER LISTENING

Same piece, different performance

This performance is about as far from Richard Goode’s classical simplicity as you could get. Gould and conductor Leonard Bernstein take the piece enormously slowly, and Gould wrings every ounce of expressivity from the piano part.

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Scherzo, Pastoral Sonata

The idea of putting different things in balanced opposition is common in Beethoven. The opposition didn’t have to be tragic. In the Scherzo of his Piano Sonata No 15 (the Pastoral), it feels comic. Here there are two different sorts of contrast. The first is between a simple falling octave at 00.00 and the little scurrying phrase that answers it at 00.03. The other one is between quiet (that whole first phrase) and loud (the repeat of the phrase at 00.10).

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Allegretto Scherzando, Symphony No 8

Once you start to notice these balanced pairs in Beethoven, they seem to pop up everywhere. Which is what you’d expect, as they’re fundamental to the classical style he inherited from Haydn and Mozart. In the well-known Allegretto Scherzando from the Eighth Symphony, notice how the little violin tune at 00.04 is “answered” by the cellos and basses at 00.10.